Jack Reacher 20 - Make Me

by Lee Child

  “We could drive in by night.”

  “They would see the headlights a hundred miles away.”

  “We could switch them off.”

  “We wouldn’t see our way. It’s pitch black at night. It’s the countryside.”

  “The roads are straight.”

  “Plus at the moment we’re unarmed.”

  Westwood said nothing.

  After dinner Westwood went to his room and Reacher and Chang took a stroll outside, on the Embarcadero. Near the water. The night was cool. Literally half of the Phoenix temperature. Chang had nothing but her T-shirt. She walked pressed up hard against him, for warmth. It made them clumsy, like a three-legged creature.

  Reacher said, “Are you holding me upright?”

  She said, “How do you feel now?”

  “Still got a headache.”

  “I don’t want to go back to Mother’s Rest until you feel better.”

  “I’m fine. Don’t worry.”

  “I wouldn’t go back there at all if it wasn’t for Keever. Who am I to judge? They’re meeting a need. Maybe Westwood is right. Maybe we’ll all be doing it in a hundred years.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  She said, “What?”

  “I was going to say I would save the money and choose the shotgun. But that would be tough on whoever found me. There would be a lot of mess. Same with the handgun. Same with hanging myself, or jumping off the roof. Stepping in front of a train isn’t fair to the engineer. Even drinking the Kool-Aid in a motel room isn’t fair to the maid. Maybe that’s why people choose the concierge service. Easier on the folks they leave behind. That’s worth a premium, I guess. But I still don’t see how it adds up to Merchenko money.”

  “I don’t see how we get back there. It’s like they have a ten-mile-high razor-wire fence. Except laid down flat.”

  “We should start out in Oklahoma City.”

  “You want to take the train?”

  “I want to keep our options open. We’ll figure out the fine print later. Tell Westwood to book the flights.”

  Reacher woke very early the next morning, before Chang, and he slid out of bed and shut himself in the bathroom. He had given up on his previous theory. Forever. It had been proven categorically wrong. Repeatedly. There was no ceiling. There was no upper limit. There was no reason why it should ever stop.

  Which was good to know.

  He stood in front of the mirror and twisted and turned and checked himself over. He had new bruises from falling down. The old bruise on his back where Hackett had hit him was vivid yellow and the size of a dinner plate. But he wasn’t pissing blood, and the ache was going away, and the stiffness was easing. The side of his head was still tender, and a little soft, but not exactly swollen. Not enough flesh, like the doctor had said. His headache was moderate. He wasn’t sleepy. He wasn’t dizzy. He stood on one leg and closed his eyes, and didn’t sway. He was conscious. No nausea. He hadn’t thrown up. No seizures. He walked a line of tiles, from the tub to the toilet, and back again with his eyes closed, and he didn’t stray. He touched his nose with his fingertip, and then rubbed his stomach while patting his head. No problems with coordination or movement, beyond his innate and inevitable slight clumsiness. He was no ballet dancer. Neat and deft and dexterous were adjectives that had never applied.

  The door opened behind him and Chang stepped in. He saw her in the mirror. She looked soft and sleepy. She yawned and said, “Good morning.”

  He said, “To you too.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Checking my symptoms. The doctor gave me a hell of a list.”

  “How far did you get?”

  “I still have to do memory, vision, speech, hearing, managing emotion, and thinking.”

  “You already passed managing emotion. I’ve been quite impressed. For a guy. Who was in the army. Now tell me three famous Oklahomans, since that’s where we’re going.”

  “Mickey Mantle, obviously. Johnny Bench. Jim Thorpe. Bonus points for Woody Guthrie and Ralph Ellison.”

  “Your memory is fine.” She retreated to the tub and held up two fingers. “How many?”

  “Two.”

  “Your vision is fine.”

  “Not a very stringent test.”

  “OK, stay where you are and tell me who made the bathtub.”

  He looked. There was small faint writing near the overflow hole.

  “American Standard,” he said, because he already knew.

  “Your vision is fine,” she said again.

  She whispered something very softly.

  “On the plane?” he said. “I’m totally up for that.”

  “Your hearing is fine. That’s for sure. What’s the longest word in the Gettysburg Address?”

  “Which symptom is that?”

  “Thinking.”

  He thought. “There are three. All with eleven letters. Proposition, battlefield, and consecrated.”

  “Now recite the first sentence. Like you were an actor on a stage.”

  “Lincoln was coming down with smallpox at the time. Did you know that?”

  “That’s not it.”

  “I know. That was for extra credit on memory.”

  “We already did memory. Remember? Now we’re doing speech. The first sentence.”

  “The guy who founded Getty Oil was descended from the guy the town of Gettysburg was named for.”

  “That’s not it either.”

  “That was general knowledge.”

  “Which is not even a symptom.”

  “It relates to memory.”

  “We did memory ages ago.”

  He said, loud like an actor, “ ‘Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.’ ”

  It sounded good in a bathroom. The marble gave it echo and resonance.

  He said, louder, “ ‘Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.’ ”

  She said, “Has your headache gone?”

  He said, “More or less.”

  “Which means it hasn’t yet.”

  “It’s on its way out. It was never a big deal.”

  “The doctor thought it was.”

  “The medical profession has gotten very timid. Very cautious. No sense of adventure. I lived through the night. I didn’t need observation.”

  Chang said, “I’m glad he was cautious.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  Then Westwood called on the room phone to say his travel people had booked seats on United, the only direct flight of the day. But no rush, because it left halfway through the morning. So they ordered room service coffee, to be delivered right away, and then room service breakfast, to be delivered in exactly one hour’s time.

  Very early in San Francisco was a couple hours into the day in Mother’s Rest. Not the difference between city and country habits, but merely time zones. Mother’s Rest was ahead. The general store was doing business. The diner had a few last stragglers. The motel maid was hard at work. The one-eyed clerk was in the bathroom. The Cadillac driver was in his store, and Western Union and MoneyGram and FedEx were busy.

  But the spare parts store was closed. For the irrigation systems. And the diner had no counter service. Those two guys were on a metal walkway on top of what they called Elevator Three, the old concrete giant, the biggest they had. With binoculars. And a simple system. There were two roads in, one from the east and one from the west, which was the wagon train trail, running crossways, almost directly below them. But there were no roads in from the north or the south. Just the railroad tracks. The system split the risk heavily in favor of the roads. The guys sat across from each other, one looking west, one looking east, and once every five minutes or so they would turn, and scan the railroad to the north and south, a leisurely sweep from close to far, just in case someone was w
alking in, or using some weird self-propelled machine, like an old Western movie. It became a ritual. A chance to stretch.

  Except at train time. Then the role was harder. They were looking straight down on the train, more or less, so they could see the far side. Almost. Certainly they would see someone force a door and jump down on the blind side, like an old spy movie. But at the same time equal attention had to be paid to the roads. Always. Intrusion by vehicle was judged far more likely.

  Which meant apart from once in the morning and once in the evening, the binoculars were trained on the far horizon, for early warning, through the dust in the air, fine and golden close by, then a haze in the distance.

  Visibility, about fifteen miles.

  You know the plan.

  You know it works.

  They checked out, and a doorman got a cab, and they squeezed in, three across the rear seat, with a measure of regret in some, but not in Westwood, who was a little unsettled. He said, “That was a very weird hotel. Only in San Francisco, I guess. All the time I was showering they had some guy reciting the Gettysburg Address through the bathroom ventilator.”

  Chapter 49

  The flight was fine and the Oklahoma City hotel the LA Times had booked was a grand old three-spired confection, built a hundred years before and gone a little musty, but rescued by a refresh about a decade in the past. It was adequate in every respect, and most of all it retained the kind of service Reacher wanted. He said to Chang, “Go chat with the concierge and tell him you’re the kind of person who likes to get to know a town by walking all over. But tell him naturally you’re concerned about safety. Ask him if there are parts you should avoid.”

  She came back ten minutes later with a paper tourist map, printed by the thousand for convention folk, and marked up by the concierge with a ballpoint pen. Certain inner-city neighborhoods were walled off by a thick blue line. No-go areas. Like a napkin sketch of East Berlin in the old days. One particular quadrant was both walled off and and then re-emphasized with an X so vigorous it scored through the paper.

  Chang said, “He told me not to go there day or night.”

  “My kind of place,” Reacher said.

  “I’m coming with you.”

  “I was counting on it.”

  They ate early, a late-afternoon equivalent of brunch. Plain ingredients, dressed up fancy. The coffee was good. Afterward they waited an hour for the sun to set. The long plains day came to an end. The streetlights came on. Headlights came on. The bar noise changed from afternoon quiet to evening buzz.

  Reacher said, “Let’s go.”

  It was a long walk, because the city fathers knew which side their bread was buttered. Convention business had to be protected. The wild frontier was many blocks away. The street life changed as they walked, from occasional busy workers heading home briskly, to a stoop culture with knots of people hanging out in doorways doing not very much of anything. Some of the stores had been shuttered at the close of business, and some looked like they had been boarded up for years, but others were still open and doing a trade. Food, soda, loose cigarettes.

  Chang said, “You OK?”

  “Doing fine,” Reacher said.

  He navigated by instinct, looking for the kind of place where people could gather and cars could double park for a moment. There were cars at the curbs, and some in motion. There were tricked-out Japanese coupes, and low-riders, and enormous old aircraft-carrier sedans from Buick and Plymouth and Pontiac. Some had custom modifications, with wide mag wheels, and chrome pipes, and blue chassis lights underneath. One car was lowered waist-high, with the motor sticking up through a hole in the hood panel, vertical like a miniature oil rig, with a huge four-barrel carburetor and a giant chrome air filter about level with the roof.

  Reacher stopped and looked at it.

  He said, “I need to see those satellite pictures again.”

  Chang said, “Why?”

  “There’s something wrong with them.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. Something in the back of my mind. Not a regular memory thing. I’m OK.”

  “You sure?”

  “Ask me a question.”

  “Teddy Roosevelt’s vice president.”

  “Charles Fairbanks.”

  “I thought he was a movie actor.”

  “I think that was Douglas.”

  They moved on, past sagging wood houses set close together, past weedy front yards behind wire fences, some empty, some full of trash, some with chained dogs, some littered with bright bicycles and tricycles and other children’s toys. They found a diagonal street that cut the corner between one not-quite-main drag and another. It was wide enough for three lanes, but the curbs were parked solid. It was long enough to slow down, and stop, and speed up again.

  Reacher said, “This should be fine.”

  There was stoop activity, but most of it was happening about halfway down the street. Young guys, maybe twelve years old, milling around in groups, scanning left and right for traffic.

  Reacher said, “OK, here’s where we pretend we suddenly realize what we’ve gotten ourselves into, and we beat a hasty retreat.”

  They turned around and hustled back to the not-quite-main drag behind them. They turned the tight right and walked on, roughly the same direction they had been headed, behind the street they had seen. They stopped when they guessed they were level with the invisible knot of twelve-year-olds, who they figured were hanging out a long lot’s length to their right. Plus the depth of their own back yard, plus the depth of their own house, plus their own front yard, and the sidewalk. About four hundred dark feet, Reacher figured.

  He said, “Let’s go see what they have for us.”

  Chapter 50

  They picked a boarded-up house with a broken chain on its gate. They went in, swift and decisive like they belonged, and they slipped down the side of the house, and through its back yard, to its back fence, which shared a blunt angle with the back yard of a house on the diagonal street. Probably not the house they were looking for, but close. Reacher forced a wire panel out of its frame and they slipped through, unobtrusive except for the white gleam of their faces in the yellow evening gloom.

  They walked through the new back yard and checked the view between the house and its neighbor. They were one short. All the commerce was taking place one lot to the left. There was a chain-link fence separating the yards. Easily climbed, at the cost of metallic chinking and clinking. Chang was agile. Better than Reacher. He was built for bulldozing, not gymnastics.

  The back yard they climbed into was ill maintained. Not really maintained at all, to be accurate. It was full of thigh-high grass and weeds. The rear of the house had one lit window.

  Reacher said, “Keep your right hand in your pocket when you can. Make them think you have a weapon.”

  “Does that work?”

  “Sometimes.”

  She said, “Are they dope dealers?”

  He nodded. “Like drive-through hamburgers. They use juveniles to carry the baggies and the cash back and forth to the cars. Young enough not to get arrested. Although that part might have changed. Might be just a myth these days. Especially in Oklahoma. They probably try them as adults now.”

  The lit window was on the right. Probably a living room of some kind. On the left was a window and a door, both dark. A kitchen, presumably. They swished through the miniature prairie to the door. Reacher tried the handle. Locked. He stepped sideways and looked in the window. A dim space, piled high with trash and dirty dishes. Pizza rinds, and empty cans. Red Bull and beer.

  Reacher took another sideways step and pressed against the wall. He looked in the lit window, half an eye, at an angle. He saw two guys. They were sprawled on separate sofas, staring at their phones. Their thumbs were moving. They were playing games, or texting. On a low table between them were two duffel bags. Black nylon, new but poor quality. The kind of thing that costs five bucks in a store selling cameras for ten and telescopes f
or twenty. On top of one bag was a bulk pack of rubber bands from an office supply store.

  On top of the other bag was an Uzi sub-machinegun.

  Reacher crept back and rejoined Chang at the kitchen door.

  He whispered, “We need to find a rock.”

  “For the window?”

  He nodded.

  “What about that?”

  He looked where she was pointing. A grudging yard of concrete patio. A square item with rounded corners. Slightly humped. A hole in the center. Some kind of tough material. Plastic, or vinyl, or a blend. A base for a sun umbrella.

  He whispered, “Can you throw that?”

  She said, “Sure.”

  He smiled. No kind of a willowy waif. He said, “One second after I kick the door.”

  She picked it up.

  He got in position.

  He whispered, “OK?”

  She nodded.

  One step, two, three, and he smashed his heel through the lock and the door burst open, and as he fell inside he heard the living room window shatter and the umbrella base crash to the floor. He danced through the kitchen to the living room and found the guy on the left still holding his phone, and the guy on the right with his hand moving fast toward the Uzi, but it was suddenly hooking short, because his shoulders were suddenly hunching and flinching away, a reflex reaction to the loud crash behind him, and the brittle shower of glass on his head and his neck, and the blur of a large back yard object flying through his field of vision.

  Also flying through his field of vision was Reacher’s right boot, which caught him on the side of the face and laid him out like an old raincoat tossed down on a shiny floor. Which was game over, right there, because from that point onward all Reacher had to do was scoop up the Uzi, click the selector to auto, clamp the grip safety, and aim the muzzle at the left-hand guy’s heart.

  He said, “Stay still,” and the guy did.

  No sound from the hallway. Summertime, a warm evening, everyone out on the street.